Abstract

Recently, researchers in cancer biology have engineered T cells, which play a critical role in the body’s immune response, to express receptors specific for proteins on cancer cells. These specialized T cells, termed chimeric antigen receptor T cells, have been shown to have a higher specificity and killing capability for corresponding tumor cells. In 2016, through an internship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I participated in a project to determine whether CAR T cell technology could be applied to myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells. The target protein on these cancerous plasma cells is the B cell maturation antigen (BCMA), and a primary objective of my work was determining whether BCMA could be upregulated on myeloma cells by inhibiting γ-secretase. I report the successful upregulation of BCMA using γ-secretase and the subsequent enhanced killing of myeloma cells by BCMA-specific CAR T cells.

Recently, researchers in cancer biology have engineered T cells, which play a critical role in the body’s immune response, to express receptors specific for proteins on cancer cells. These specialized T cells, termed chimeric antigen receptor T cells, have been shown to have a higher specificity and killing capability for corresponding tumor cells. In 2016, through an internship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I participated in a project to determine whether CAR T cell technology could be applied to myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells. The target protein on these cancerous plasma cells is the B cell maturation antigen (BCMA), and a primary objective of my work was determining whether BCMA could be upregulated on myeloma cells by inhibiting γ-secretase. I report the successful upregulation of BCMA using γ-secretase and the subsequent enhanced killing of myeloma cells by BCMA-specific CAR T cells.

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